They say France is the 3rd largest Korean diaspora community, however, I wasn’t too impressed with what I found from the net. I thought there’d at least be a small Korean town or a street that’s dedicated to the population (if you know one, please, let me know!), but I have yet to discover one.

What I DO know is at this moment, there are over 58 restaurants in Korea that is dedicated to French cuisine. See the list and websites below if you want to take a stab at French cuisine in Korea. Gangnam has over 20 restaurants alone.

My favorite thing to eat in the blistering hot Korean summer is bingsu. I’m not a huge fan of hot weather, so this popular dessert of shaved ice milk and assorted toppings is a perfect way to cool off. Starting around May you’ll see new businesses that open just for the summer, and you can assume that most of them are bingsu places. This summer I’ve noticed that a specific chain called Sulbing 설빙, which originated in Busan, has spread throughout the country. I’ve seen Sulbing or a ripoff version of Sulbing even in small towns in the country! We realized when we filmed this video that the two videos we’ve done about this tasty treat have both featured mango bingsu, so we decided to ask some friends to send us some pictures of their favorite bingsu around the country so that we could share it!

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but July 13th marked 4 years in Korea for us! We’re a little bit late on celebrating this, but with our Youtube milestones and summer vacation, we didn’t want to overwhelm you guys with too much of the same thing (that thing being awesomeness hehe)!

We went searching for the rabbit monk at 표충사 Pyochungsa and played in the river!

The Inspiration

One of our new hobbies is traveling to lesser-known temples by car! Before we had the car, we often went to obscure temples with Dale from Dale’s Korean Temple Adventures. He took us to some amazing temples that not many foreigners have been too, and we felt so lucky to be friends with him and live in the same neighborhood! Eventually, we wanted to adventure on our own, but every time we’d scope out a new temple on Dale’s site, it usually said it’s only accessible by car!

I’m writing a series for the Free Word Centre. This lovely, London-based bunch describe themselves as ‘a centre for literature, literacy and free expression in the world’ and aim to develop projects that ‘explore the transformative power of words.’ Basically, they go about sprinkling joy into the world and you can check them out here:

My wee contribution to this is a series called Adventures in Korean about my attempts at learning the language and the links I’ve discovered between it and Korean culture in the process.

I was recently asked to give a short presentation on my experience teaching at a Korean elementary school. I have been wanting to make more videos in and about my school, so this was the perfect opportunity! I asked two of my best students – Gaeun and Jiyeon – if they would help me out and give a tour of our school in English. They highlighted several things they thought were unique about our school, but I do want to point out that these differences are not across the board generalizations. Rather, they are differences between my current school in Korea and what I remember from elementary school in America (which was a long time ago!).

If you’re not already aware I’ll be leaving in about a week. I know I’m going on about it a fair bit, but it is what I’ve been building up to for quite a while and it feels appropriate to me to talk about it a lot. Right now, in terms of being in Korea, it doesn’t feel like there is much else I should be talking about. One thing though that I’d like to make clear though is my intentions.

Never at any point have I turned around and said I have to get out of Korea for some abhorrent reason, like the usual tripe you hear about the inadequacies of Korea, Koreans, or indeed the inadequacies of those who cannot accept that this is a very different country to the one which they were raised in. I could go on here, but I won’t.